[Labs-l] A proposal for better tool discoverability

[Danmichaelo]

It's great if this catches on, but we need a way to express multiple
authors. Could we have an "authors" field instead of "author", and use an
array instead of a string? I would also prefer "keywords" to be an array
instead of a comma-separated string.

It would also be great if the description could be fetched from the
~/.description file read at http://tools.wmflabs.org/ if not specified in
the .json file. I would prefer to maintain a description of my tools in one
place rather than in two. Perhaps maintainers could also be fetched
automatically if not specified manually?

Dan Michael


On 13 August 2014 17:15, Hay (Husky) <huskyr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey everyone,
> for those who attended Wikimania, i hope you all had a wonderful time!
>
> One of the things that i've talked about at Mania with a few people is
> the current way of 'tool discovery', or rather, the lack thereof.
> We've seen really cool things done by the community, but i have a
> feeling many of the tools go by unnoticed, simply because nobody knows
> that they exist. Maybe they've been send around here or posted on IRC,
> but after the initial interest many of them are forgotten and lead a
> lonely life on our virtual servers.
>
> I think this is especially problematic for non-community members for
> whom the tools might be very useful. For example, as a Wikipedian in
> Residence and GLAM advocate i have sent numerous mails with links to
> the various GLAM tools made by Magnus, stats.grok.se, etcetera.
>
> But, you might say, we run all these knowledge sites called wikis
> right? And there are some pages there that list tools, don't they?
> You're right, the community has put some efforts in a few pages (1).
> However, IMHO, a wiki doesn't lend itself to easy tool discovery:
>
> * The format on how to describe a tool is unclear, thereby leading to
> both very long and very short descriptions.
> * It's not possible to easily search for tools in a certain category
> (e.g. 'GLAM' or 'editcount').
> * The categorization of tools leads to much clicking around,
> distracting and confusing users.
> * There's no way to sort results, for example by the number of people
> using the tool.
>
> The biggest problem of all is the disconnection between the actual
> code of the tool itself (hosted in a Git repo), and the description
> advertising it. People update their tool to do something different (or
> deprecate it), but they forget the documentation on the wiki, don't
> remove it when the tool doesn't work anymore, etcetera.
>
> I believe we can, and should do better.
>
> THE PROPOSAL
>
> My proposal is to use the same mechanisms that already exist for
> package managers such as NPM (2) or 'app stores', such as the Chrome
> store (3). Basically this involes adding a small JSON file to your
> project, including a few key properties such as 'title' and
> 'description'. These files get indexed, and an easy to use frontend to
> search to all the tools is provided to end users. You could imagine a
> 'toolinfo.json' file to look something like this:
>
>     {
>         "name" : "WikiDataQuery",
>         "description" : "An API for Wikidata items and properties.",
>         "url" : "http://wdq.wmflabs.org/",
>         "keywords" : "wikidata, api, query",
>         "author" : "Magnus Manske"
>     }
>
> If you have a web-hosted tool, simply stick it in the root of your
> tools directory so that it's reachable by the crawler. Whenever your
> tool data changes, just update the file and the directory will
> automatically update the directory site.
>
> The link to your toolinfo.json could be added to a Wiki page so that
> it's easy to remove your tool from the directory or change the URL to
> the JSON file.
>
> I'm a firm believer in putting code where your mouth is, so i've
> hacked up a working tool directory here:
>
> http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory
>
> Try searching for stuff, clicking on the labels. To add your own tool,
> scroll the page down for instructions.
>
> Current this only lists my tools, but i hope that this directory will
> soon grow with everything the Wikimedia community has to offer.
>
> I'm interested in your opinion in this proposal and, if you like it,
> add a toolinfo.json to your project!
>
> Kind regards,
> -- Hay / [[User:Husky]]
>
> 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools
> 2: https://www.npmjs.org/
> 3: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/manifest
>
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>
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